


The Naming of Things

by John the Alligator (Chyronic)



Series: The Superhero AU [3]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, But On Earth, Canon-Typical Space Mafia, Fake Marriage, Gen, This is the closest I get to writing fluff, Trans Female Character, is it gen if my ship happens in this series eventually: an eternal question, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-25
Updated: 2016-02-25
Packaged: 2018-05-23 04:14:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6104572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chyronic/pseuds/John%20the%20Alligator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Twenty-eight years too late but I fucking did it.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>He wonders if he might have been wrong on the carnage. “Are you implying you need an alibi, here, or—”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naming of Things

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline concerns: Tezzeret has his arm but still works for Nicol Bolas. For now.

When Baltrice slams her handful of paperwork down on the table the whole thing shakes. So does the floor.

In the time he’s known her Tezzeret has apparently already learned enough to just drop his compass, pull his hands back, and thank a nonexistent G-d on behalf of his blueprints that he works in pencil now. After a moment, when no unprompted explanation seems forthcoming, he says, “Yes?”

“I did it.” She looks like she just came out of a fight, breathing and the dazed edge to her expression at odds with the general lack of appropriate carnage. “Twenty-eight years too late but I fucking did it.”

He wonders if he might have been wrong on the carnage. “Are you implying you need an alibi, here, or—”

“No, giant brain,” Baltrice says, and taps her temple for emphasis, her left hand still clenched on the papers, “the birth certificate went through, I just got it.”

Belatedly she pulls out the chair in front of her and comes closer to falling than sitting. It still takes Tezzeret a second to fully figure out what she’s talking about, shame on him, but while Baltrice isn’t exactly subtle about the matter Tezzeret thinks he can be forgiven for not realizing that this is, however incidentally, her explicitly coming out. He files the confirmation for reference.

“So is it crass to ask how it took that long—” Yes. Yes it is. Shit. “I mean, given Consortium resources. I would’ve thought…”

“Nah,” she says—interrupts, a mercy—shakes her head jerkily, shoves the destabilized hair behind one ear. “Christ, I need to get rid of this. Anyway. I wanted to do things legitimately, you know, for once?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer. “No, you don’t, but… Hell, the Consortium did enough for me on this already. I wanted this to be mine. And the U.S. government’s, I guess, screw them for making me pay hundreds of dollars solely for the privilege of jumping through their damn hoops.” Before Tezzeret can say anything, she looks down at the fist still tight around the paperwork, and makes a visible effort to relax, which visibly fails. “Hey, want to see?”

“Sure,” he says. When she tosses the sheaf of paper at him his fingers bend a second too late to catch it. Tezzeret gives up and grabs it with his left hand.

He’s been putting off maintenance for too long, not out of laziness but because he resents the sick and fruitless feeling that comes from facing up to the distance between what he knows should be true and what the world is willing to give him. (In the moment it takes to shake his eyes from a new dent above his third finger, he supposed he might know why Baltrice took the trouble to do things legitimately.)

That is an unexpectedly large amount of letters failing to make sense. “‘Cio’…”

“No, it’s,” and she says something that sounds like “kineech”, then, into the silence afterwards, “the bastards wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I had to come up with a last name, because it’s not like I’m keeping the one he gave me, and. Well.”

Baltrice has gone vaguely pink. More so than usual. She’s still all sharp, stressed lines, and he corrects his earlier assessment: if she’d walked away from a fight and into the room she’d be calmer than this. The last time he saw her nervous one of them should’ve been dead.

“Breathe,” he finds himself saying. “You look like you’re expecting an ambush, and unless you know something I don’t, here—”

Her body stays stiff but her shoulders turn inwards. “Yeah. Right. This is stupid, you’re right.”

“I did not say that.” That is not the reaction he wanted at all. Putting aside that he’s still confused why he leapt on her mood as a problem worth fixing… “Listen, have you ever seen me call something stupid and make it _subtle_? I said ‘breathe’, because you weren’t.”

“Shut up,” she says, but there: the too-sharp energy is gone. Now she just sounds tired.

He does. Possibly for novelty’s sake.

The resulting silence is strangely companionable, and stretches for long enough that Tezzeret risks going back to work.

Some progress aside, his sense of her sense of timing evidently needs fine-tuning.

“We might as well just get married,” Baltrice says, and when Tezzeret drops his compass again it tears a hole in the paper. Possibly the table.

“What the fuck.”

“I probably could have phrased that better,” she admits, after a good few seconds of him gawping.

“If this is you propositioning me—” Tezzeret says before thinking better of it (which is apparently the theme of the day) or in fact determining what the end of that sentence is.

“No,” Baltrice snaps, blushing clear from her neck to her ears. Given how often that happens, this is sadly uninformative.

“Then I’m missing something here.”

“That’s new.” She sighs, somewhat pointedly, in case he thought that was a compliment. “I was thinking about legal stuff anyway, all right? Neither of us exactly has the greatest records in the world, but we’ve been working together for, what?” She answers her own question with a vague gesture.

“Eight months,” Tezzeret says, anyway, on autopilot. Give or take.

“Sure. Eight months. Any dirt the Consortium has on you, I was probably the only witness, yeah?”

“Is that a threat…?” If she knows him at all Baltrice should be able to assume he’s skipped spelling out a yes. Good for her if so; Tezzeret himself is utterly lost.

“No, you idiot,” she says, turning even redder. “Married couples can’t be forced to testify against each other. I don’t think Nicol Bolas would try to throw the courts at us, but if we’re going to take him down any extra insurance on our side is worth it.”

‘ _We_?’

The world grinds to a halt.

Tezzeret has been working with, or stuck with, her for less than a year, on assignment, and now it’s “we”? (Absently, it occurs to him to be glad that if his face feels like it’s on fire, at least he gets the dignity of that not being visible.)

Baltrice—Cionaodh, apparently, not that Tezzeret can exactly judge her for that—just… proposed to him, first of all, he thinks he stands by his first assessment: what the fuck.

And, far more seriously, she intends to help him oust Nicol Bolas. And thought that her volunteering as an accomplice was too obvious to need saying. Tezzeret’s plans hadn’t even extended to how to shake her, yet.

He should be panicking. This should be dangerous, even before addressing how limited Tezzeret’s ability to predict her still is, but he finds himself queuing up the argument that he can’t alienate someone as high up as she is who knows his intentions _now_ , before leaving he finds a reason not to be comfortable with the idea.

Logic says: if it came to that, Baltrice is the right combination of supposedly honorable and utterly transparent for her to opt to warn him before she’d go to Bolas. So he could turn her away now and, if necessary, still kill her, and get on with the takeover unnoticed.

He doesn’t want to.

Beyond not wanting to go to the intricate and bloody trouble, or having to negate the effort he spent saving her life. He wants Baltrice alive.

He should be worried, he reminds himself. He should be afraid. But no how hard he tries to be at least uncomfortable, “we” sounds fine.

Tezzeret lets himself decide, and resumes.

Baltrice is snapping her fingers at him. “Hello? Anyone in there? Preferably Tezzeret?”

“ _We’re_ taking down Bolas?” he says, slow, incredulous.

“You think I didn’t figure you want to?” She seems to realize that wasn’t his actual question after a moment. “And it’s you, so you don’t just want things, I knew you’d have a plan already. And your plans are—” She catches herself. “Usually decent. And. Yeah. Me. Whatever.” She stares fixedly at the wall over his shoulder. “He’s a shitty boss, I don’t think you could be much worse if you tried.”

He laughs; he doesn’t mean to, it feels like it’s being torn out of him, and he’s finally let go, at least for a second, of wondering what the hell is going on. “To be entirely honest, I’m trying to find the right set of objections and they’re not coming. So I guess it’s a plan.”

She grins.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun AU facts: Every time Tezzeret is interrupted while working on something he's redesigning his arm. He doesn't even redesign it that often, the universe just hates him like that.
> 
> Other things that will probably never come up in canon: Baltrice spent several years wearing her hair long (by her standards) for the purpose of dealing with doctors. She hates it, despite the fact that "long" by her definition is "as short as you can get while still technically qualifying as a bob".
> 
> [About that name.](http://www.behindthename.com/name/cionaodh) Baltrice arrived at it through the time-honored tradition of "that thing I like, but not in English".


End file.
